More About the iPod and the Penguin

usb-storage: device found at 5
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Vendor: Apple Model: iPod Rev: 1.62
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision : 00
SCSI device sdc: 117210240 512-byte hdwr sectors (60012 MB)
sdc: Write Protect is off
sdc: Mode Sense: 6c 00 00 08
sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdc: 117210240 512-byte hdwr sectors (60012 MB)
sdc: Write Protect is off
sdc: Mode Sense: 6c 00 00 08
sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
/dev/scsi/host7/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2
Attached scsi removable disk sdc at scsi7, channel 0, id 0, lun

Now, Doing Something Useful

Great! Your iPod is now a removable hard disk. How about syncing up your music collection, your favorite podcasts, and your picture library? That’s coming, but I’m warning you, this stuff isn’t totally baked yet, and a number of workarounds are required.

Why is getting your iPod synced to your favorite music and podcasts such a pain? Even though the iPod is recognized as a USB storage device in most newer versions of Linux, you can’t just take your .mp3 files and dump them onto your iPod and expect them to play. While the iPod works as a removable hard disk just fine and is fully usable under Linux just like any other USB mass storage device, the iPod has an internal database and a proprietary directory structure and layout that must be created and maintained to play music.

And unfortunately, there’s no standardized interface to the iPod on Linux. There’s no universal library, no agreed upon programming interfaces, nada. Connecting to the iPod requires reverse-engineering, and each open source project for the iPod has implemented support in its own unique way.

To add insult to injury, if you use different sync programs with the same iPod, you can scramble your resident iTunes database, requiring you to re-initialize your iPod and re-sync your whole song library. Hence, if you choose to use any open source iPod programs, you’ll want to stick with the one that best suits your purposes and not mix and match.

Sync Software

gtkpod is an iPod synchronization application written with the GTK tool set, and it’s a pretty robust application. If you’re using Ubuntu Breezy (with “Universe” enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list) or Debian, you can install gtkpod from the terminal window with a quick sudo apt-get install gtkpod. If you’re using Red Hat or Fedora Core, you can download binaries from the gtkpod web site at http://www.gtkpod.org.

(Alternatively, if you want to actually build the software from source, you’ll need gcc and the GTK development libaries, the libgpod source from the gtkpod project page, and the libid3tag source from the MPEG Audio Decoder project at http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/. Unpack all of the source code and run ./configure, make, and make install in each source code directory to generate a working install of gtkpod. If you’re using a 64-bit Linux, you might need to copy or symlink libgpod.so.0 from /usr/lib64/ to /lib64 before gtkpod will run.)

gtkpod is particularly useful for initializing a virgin iPod fresh out of the box, because gtkpod knows how to create the directory structures that iTunes creates. Choose “Edit& gt; Preferences” and verify that the mount directory for the iPod is specified as /media/ipod. (By default, it might be set to /mnt/ipod, which is the older standard.) Then select “File& gt; Create iPod’s Directories” from the main menu to initialize the device.

Another good iPod sync program is YamiPod (http://www.yamipod.com). I particularly like YamiPod because it’s a self-hosting program, it’s a single executable, it’s pre-built (it’s not open source), and it depends on a single library that comes with the software, libfmodex, which needs to be copied to /usr/lib/. YamiPod is also multi-platform, so you can download a version for Windows and the Mac as well, should you need to share your iPod between several different machines, like your Mac at home and your Linux or Windows box at work. Using YamiPod across the three platforms precludes corruption of the database.

YamiPod does pretty much everything gtkpod does, but it also has some advanced capabilities, such as a feature to repair or recover an iPod file and a feature to backup and restore the iTunes database. I also find YamiPod’s folder and file synchronization more straightforward than gtkpod’s. Using YamiPod, once you set up the folders that you want to sync to your iPod, it’s easy to keep your iPod up-to-date.

iPod-Aware Media Players

In addition to dedicated synchronization software, there are a handful of Linux media players that also support the iPod and can simultaneously act as your synchronization client.

amarok is an extremely sophisticated and mature multi-format media player written for KDE. amarok is able to sync music files to your iPod using the kio_ipodslave library, and is also able to perform more advanced tasks, such as file conversion (.ogg to .mp3). amarok also has many scriptable plug-ins.

On Ubuntu (again, with the Universe repository turned on) and Debian, amarok can be installed with sudo apt-get install amarok. On Fedora, if you do a complete install with the “Extras” disc, or with a complete SUSE 10 install, amarok should be immediately usable.

Banshee (http://www.banshee-project.org/) is a relatively new GNOME media player sponsored by Novell/Ximian and the Mono project. If you’re running SUSE Linux 10, you can install Banshee simply by going into YAST2 and searching on “banshee”. The Banshee Project “Getting Started” page (http://banshee-project.org/Getting_Started) has a list of other distros and how to get the software working on them. However, Banshee is still “betaware,” so it’s still relatively buggy. Also, be advised that Banshee has a lot of dependencies, so unless you’re a seasoned software developer and understand the intricacies of Mono, don’t even try building it from source.

Podcast Aggregation

While Yamipod, amarok, and Banshee have podcast subscription management built-in, the implementation is rudimentary: Using any of the three tools, you can add the URL of the XML RSS file of the podcast to your download list and sync it directly to your iPod.

For more sophisticated Internet-aware Podcast directory support along the lines of what iTunes provides, you’ll want to look at something like CastPodder. CastPodder (http://www.castpodder.net, pictured in Figure Three) is the Linux-based fork of the multi-platform Juice Receiver (http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net), which was based on the original iPodder concept by podcast pioneer Adam Curry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry). If you want to find podcasts on the Internet and have the richest possible podcast listening experience on Linux, CastPodder should be on your download list. It’s a robust application that’s really easy to use.